Hampstead Garden Opera presents Handel's, Semele

Semele loves Jupiter, not wisely but too well. His jealous wife Juno deploys all her armoury of tricks to spoil the party, with dire consequences for the naïve girl.

Hot on the heels of directing HGO’s sell-out production of The Magic Flute, James Hurley returns to Upstairs at the Gatehouse with an inventive new production of Handel’s Semele. "I want us to tell the story of Semele as clearly as we can” says Hurley. “Handel's opera-oratorio provides us with a rich mix of mortal and immortal characters, in settings that range from earth to heaven, and all places in between. I needed to find a way of showing this diversity of character and space in a way that plays to the strengths of the theatre’s intimate and inclusive environment for opera performance. The disused, dust-sheeted environment of the backstage of a theatre seemed an intriguing place to start; an empty, hollow representation of immortality, which nevertheless brims with the possibility of life amidst all its disused performance artefacts. In this environment I felt we could show the gods in their element from the start - delighting and horrifying each other, as they stage-manage the mortal world in their midst."